This show wants you to crave a gunfight

Quite a few people call this show boring and anti climactic. How anyone can find a show, with rich dialogue coming out of great actors, playing deep characters, "boring" is beyond me.

Anyways first time I watched Deadwood I kept expecting this big old wild west style gunfight to break out. I'd been brainwashed by Hollywood to expect a posse of cowboys and Indians going at each other. That doesnt happen. there are no big shootouts on this show. Thats whats so great about it. Milch(the show runner and head writer for those who don't know) was detoxing the audience from all the conditioning decades of macho shoot em up westerns movies/TV shows had caused. There's a stretch in season 2, towards the end, where I was going thru conflict withdrawal. Where were my gunfights? My duels at sundown? I want bullets and blood damn you! But then that rich and creamy Milch dialogue would come pouring out Al Swearengens mouth & it would all become so clear. This was the point.

The Sopranos and Deadwood are both a master class in tension build up and anticlimax(this is a compliment. It would be phoney for every conflict to end in a gang war or Mexican stand off). That anticlimactic build up makes the scenes where we do see violence/death all the more powerful and meaningful. Everyone remembers the Captain/Dan fight, why? Because it's real, brutal and a long time coming. When(Sopranos season 4 spoiler alert) Tony finally beats Raplie to death? That was the same thing. Sopranos season 4 only has 4-5 deaths all season long. The audience was going nuts for some kind of gang war. Then Raplhie dies & by the finale the Sopranos family is split in two. Carmela & Tony separate which puts the entire season in a different perspective. Deadwood is more or less what the lore of valiant cowboys & go get em Sherifs really looked like. No fancy gunplay or good triumphing over evil. Just money, booze, mud, whores & disease. That's all it was.